Lib Dem conference - the first 24 hours

One of the things that no-one warns you about when you are first appoint to speak for the Liberal Democrats on an issue is the party conference. Watching the conference on TV you could be forgiven for thinking that all we do is sit in a large conference hall listening to speeches and voting on motions. The reality is that most of the action takes place around the fringe, with meetings literally morning, noon and night. When I looked at my diary for this week I reckoned I had 18 separate speaking engagements on everything from the melting of the polar ice caps to the need to capture carbon emissions from power stations. One or two of these are in the main conference hall but most are in fringe meetings attended by keen delegates, many of whom are experts in the field. At previous conferences I did the round of fringe meetings on pensions and benefits, then on health and now on environment and energy. There is a huge amount of material to get your head round and there's always someone in the room who knows more about the subject than you do. The good thing is that you learn from the other people on the panel and from the questions and so the next time the topic comes up you feel a bit more prepared. But the first year of fringe meetings on any topic, as it is for me this year with the environment, is always pretty daunting.

This afternoon I took a break from fringe meetings to hear Nick do a Q&A session in the main auditorium. As leader you really do have to be ready to deal with everything that people throw at you. Nick was at his most passionate denouncing the Tories' lack of substance and expressing the view that the British public are not willing to hand over the keys to Number 10 to someone who is not prepared to tell them what he will do with that power - and when the Tories do start to come clean, many people will realise that the Cameron transformation is only skin deep. Nick stressed his commitment to internationalism as a solution to many of the pressing issues that we face, including climate change and international terror, and contrasted our policy of constructive engagement in Europe with the Tory plan to leave the European Peoples' Party and band together with what he called "a bunch of nutters". The final question linked the fact that Nick and his wife Miriam are expecting their third child in the New Year with the difficulties of combining family life and politics. Nick confirmed he would be taking paternity leave and said that he generally preferred spending time of an evening at home reading books to his children than hanging out with MPs in Westminster bars. Doesn't sound like much of a contest to me!